1. Field of Invention
The present invention relates to a sewing apparatus, particularly to a technology in which when a single embroidery pattern or a plurality of embroidery patterns selected via a display are projected from one embroidery region, the region is divided into a plurality of embroidery regions and the sewing operation is carried out over plural times.
2. Description of Related Art
Conventionally, according to an electronic control type embroidery machine for household use as a sewing apparatus, an embroidery data memory installed to ROM (involatile memory) of a control device, is stored with pattern data of practically-used patterns of linear seam, zigzag seam and so on, letter patterns of Japanese syllabary and the like and a plurality of embroidery patterns of symbols, marks, various patterns and so on. While displaying these patterns on a display, searching a desired pattern by switching display screens and selecting a desired embroidery pattern, a selected embroidery pattern can simply be sewn by only operating a sewing start switch.
When, for example, a name of a child is sewn by embroidery sewing on a cloth bag by using an embroidery machine, where a number of letters is large and an embroidery frame mounted to the embroidery machine is small, several letters at the end of the name may be outside of an embroidery region of the embroidery frame. In this case, an error message may be displayed and letters outside of the embroidery region may not be inputted. Accordingly, sewing operation is carried out by inputting only a row of letters which can be sewn in the embroidery region as a first step, cloth for fabrication is restretched to the embroidery frame and thereafter, sewing operation is carried out after inputting the remaining letter row.
In the case of inputting letters of a name, no problem is posed when all of a letter row can be inputted because the letter size is small and sewing can be carried out in one operation. However, when letters are projected from an embroidery region by enlarging the size of letters in an editing operation, similar to the above-described, sewing operation is carried out by inputting several letters which can be sewn as a first step, restretching the cloth to an embroidery frame and then inputting and sewing the remaining letter row.
In this case, for reference, the applicant has proposed a technology in Japanese Patent Publication No. 2653257 in which, for example, when a name of a baseball team is embroidered over left and right front portions of a uniform, in the case where a letter is divided at a position where the left and right front portions overlap, the letter is previously divided and embroidery data is formed for the respective front portions.
As has been described above, when all of a plurality of patterns to be sewn cannot be inputted in one operation due to a size of sewing and a size of an embroidery frame, several patterns are partially and selectively set at respective operations of sewing. In that case, patterns for sewing are selectively set one by one after displaying them on a pattern selecting screen at respective operations of selecting patterns, which are devoid of operational performance. When the respective operations of sewing are carried out at a second and subsequent times, by restretching cloth for fabrication, it is very difficult to set the cloth for fabrication such that a pattern sewn at a preceding time beautifully continues to a pattern of a current time. That is, it is difficult to ensure that a portion of an embroidery region at the preceding time is made to overlap an embroidery region at the current time and therefore, the operational efficiency of sewing operation is deteriorated.